III. The Fictional Institutions of LOST:

World Building, Reality and the Economic Possibilities of Narrative DivergenceDerek Johnson

In ‘Tricia Tanaka is Dead’ (3.10), castaway Hurley (Jorge Garcia) happens upon a mysterious, run-down van in the jungle and en-

deavours to coax it back to life. While Hurley lacks appropriate tools – much less replacement parts – to complete this task, the decades-old case of beer that he fi nds in the back of the van provides him the perfect enticement with which to enlist the help of fellow castaways Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway). Like many tele-vision programmes of the past, LOST chooses to disguise the cor-porate origins and brand identity of the beer-fi lled van that Hurley happens across. Th ough its unique shape betrays the van as a classic VW Bus, the iconic Volkswagen logo is replaced by the stark, black and white octagonal imprint of the fi ctional Dharma Initiative, the mysterious research group whose presence on the island has yet to be fully explained. Similarly, the Dharma logo marks the beer in the van as an off -brand – just as unrecognizable, unidentifi able and un-consumable by the viewer at home as the generic bottles of ‘cola’ and ‘breakfast fl akes’ that might have sat on the kitchen tables of previ-ous television families like the Bradys or Huxtables.

And yet, in the real world, removed from LOST’s monsters, mys-teries and magnetic fi elds, these fi ctional imprints have taken on a cultural and economic signifi cance that transcends similar generic status. Real people walk down the street wearing Dharma baseball caps, headed to work where they might drink coff ee out of a Dhar-ma-emblazoned mug and procrastinate by exploring the web space

Reading LOST

of the fi ctional Hanso Foundation that supposedly funds Dharma. Meanwhile, other fi ctional brands of consumables established on the series have bled into the real world; like Hurley, LOST viewers can now buy and eat Apollo candy bars.

Of course, only a very few allow the fi ctional institutions of LOST to so permeate their experience of the real world – those devoted fans willing to spend time and money on LOST merchandise. Th ese specialized nodes for experiencing the LOST world undoubtedly capture added merchandising revenues for its producer-distributor ABC, but as a niche market (not even inclusive of all hardcore LOST fans), products marked with fi ctional imprints like Dharma, Hanso and Apollo seem inadequate and counterintuitive in the current broadcast television economy. As the bread-and-butter advertising revenues paid to US networks like ABC by real corporations becomes increasingly hard to come by (due to increasing competition between media outlets), commercial comedies and dramas have, by and large, moved to foreground those real corporations within the story itself. On other contemporary US prime-time serials, a beer-fi lled van would surely have presented not just impetus for character action, but also lucrative opportunities for product placement. Th e producers of 24 (Imagine Entertainment, 2001– ), for example, repeatedly enter into contractual relations with automakers like Ford and Toyota, agreeing to outfi t heroes like Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) exclusively with their products each season. Heroes (NBC Universal Television, 2006– ) made a similar arrangement with Nissan, allowing Hiro’s (Masi Oka) preference for the Versa to become a plot point in an early fi rst-season episode. Programmes like Th e 4400 (Renegade 83, 2004– ) and Entourage (HBO, 2004) strike like deals with alcohol distributors such as Budweiser and Skyy Vodka respectively. Automobiles and al-cohol, therefore, comprise only two of the innumerable markets that might seem to be product placement no-brainers.

So while Hurley takes full economic advantage of the van and the booze, the producers of LOST miss a similar opportunity. Would not Budweiser or Miller Genuine Draft have been thrilled to cough up some cash to be presented as the beer with the everlasting fl avour to make such a satisfying reward for Sawyer? What automaker would

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not have loved to see a popular character like Hurley take so much interest in their van and ultimately use it to stage a heroic rescue in the subsequent season fi nale? Nevertheless, instead of building content around sponsors’ brands, LOST emphasizes the assumedly less lucrative project of showcasing the fi ctional Dharma logo. De-spite its non-existence in the ‘real’ world of global capital, Dharma has been emphasized diegetically as a brand of its own, with its im-print appearing throughout the second and third seasons of the se-ries on consumable goods like wine, macaroni and cheese, cornfl akes and composition notebooks. Apparently, Dharma makes and pack-ages its own brands of durable and consumable goods, shutting out corporate suppliers from the real world. In the world of LOST the Dharma brand, not those of sponsors, takes priority.

Viewed with rose-tinted glasses, this failure to cater to real-world corporate sponsors could be ascribed to the producers’ greater ar-tistic commitment to establishing the enigmatic Dharma Initiative’s prior presence and continuing impact on the island. Supposedly founded in 1970 by University of Michigan graduate students and the similarly fi ctional Hanso Foundation to conduct interdisciplin-ary scientifi c and social research across the globe, Dharma studied the castaways’ island until the early 1990s, when a group of as-yet-unidentifi ed hostiles violently drove them off . Th e series has used its trademark fl ashbacks to introduce a few characters that worked un-der the Dharma banner (like the mysterious name-changing doctor in the orientation fi lms and Roger, the workman Hurley later fi nds dead in the van). Yet the castaways’ interactions with the Initiative occur primarily at the institutional level: not through characters, but through the Dharma-constructed infrastructure of mysterious hatches, communication towers that promise contact with civiliza-tion, and food and supply provisions (that, as the episode ‘Lock-down’ (2.17) suggests, Dharma may continue to deliver, if only by automation).

Because Dharma manifests itself primarily as an institution, Dharma-brand products as shown in ‘Tricia Tanaka is Dead’ prove in-tegral to the producers’ plotting and world-building eff orts. Marked goods like automobiles and alcohol render the faceless Dharma

Reading LOST

visually tangible as a narrative agent; the integration of real-world products instead would superfi cially trade story-world depth for a quick buck. Nor could producers easily have their cake and eat it too by stocking those Dharma hatches with name-brand products for the castaways to consume; while producers may have indeed recognized the potential for product placement inherent in the second season introduction of the hatches, the contingent, indefi nite nature of the Dharma Initiative would mitigate its attractiveness to potential sponsors. Th e institution might seem a benevolent, utopian research group one day, but later plot developments could make it a villainous cabal bent on world domination – and few corporations want to be recognized as the offi cial sponsor and supplier of evil. Dedication to deep transmedia storytelling and world-building ambitions, there-fore, could rationalize LOST’s dismissal of product placement strate-gies embraced by other television series.

Th at explanation, however, ignores the economic realities of con-temporary television, and the increasing extension of television and displacement of advertiser interest into the digital realm of the In-ternet and viral video. If so many other narrative series have taken on product placement as a means of funding production, how could LOST aff ord such dedication to the story alone? How were economic needs in a depressed advertising market alternatively met if, given the story the producers wanted to tell, product placement could not be relied upon as it has been in other narrative series? Could the gen-eration of fi ctional, branded institutions like Dharma actually serve to satisfy those economic exigencies in another way?

To explore these possibilities, this chapter fi rst investigates the economic factors driving LOST to experiment with new forms and strategies of promotion, storytelling and extension of fi ctional brands. What kind of revenue models prove necessary in a weakened broadcasting market in the USA? How do diff erent television genres and modes of storytelling collaborate or confound those economic needs? Second, this chapter examines how branded fi ctional institu-tions on LOST like Dharma and Hanso have been constructed by pro-ducers and engaged with by audiences, both on television and across media platforms. How has the narrative divergence of LOST across

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a range of media introduced fi ctional brands within the spaces and experiences of everyday life? How do these fi ctional entities become truly institutionalized as structures with which audiences, not just characters, interact? Lastly, this paper explores how LOST’s institu-tional focus on fi ctional corporations could serve a counterintuitive economic end in an industrial moment where programmes must in-creasingly foreground real brands within their stories. How might institutionalized fi ctional brands be developed into alternative rev-enue models? Why would fi ctional corporations prove advantageous in making narrative series like LOST attractive to real corporate in-terests?

Ultimately, LOST strikes a unique relationship between fi ctional storytelling and ‘reality’ – both in the lived realm of everyday life, and the television genre in which non-traditional revenue models have thrived. By refusing to use real corporations in lieu of fi ctional institutions within the story, LOST erects a diegetic boundary that prevents it from following reality TV’s lead in designing content around sponsors. In extending those fi ctional institutions across me-dia and into the real world, however, everyday life overlaps the nar-rative of LOST, allowing real corporate institutions like Sprite and Jeep to become both producers of content and content themselves. LOST eschews the product placement of reality TV, but it has proven attractive to advertisers for off ering fi ctional institutions with which real corporations can interface in the mediation of everyday life.

THE ECONOMIC CHALLENGES OF BROADCAST TELEVISION

Th e US television industry has undergone considerable transition in the last decade, with the networks increasingly reliant on the reality genre and, as a result, decreasingly investing in narrative properties like LOST. As Chad Raphael argues, reality television emerged in the 1990s as ‘a cost-cutting solution’ at a moment when media conglom-eration changed the economics of production. Although the debt in-curred by corporate expansion made conglomerates leery of heavy investment and defi cit fi nancing, the relaxation and eventual 1995 repeal of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (which had

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previously prohibited networks from owning the series they distrib-uted in prime time and sharing in subsequent off -network syndica-tion revenues) incentivized increased in-house production. Cheaper reality programming thus fulfi lled both needs.1

Similarly, Ted Magder suggests that the reality genre has intro-duced entirely new economic models to the television industry. Con-cerns about viewers skipping commercials via digital video recorders (DVRs) have required networks to respond to the changing needs of skittish advertisers: ‘what reality TV and formats reveal most of all is that the traditional revenue model used to produce commercial television is becoming anachronistic. We are entering a new era of product placement and integration, merchandising, pay-per-view, and multiplatform content.’2

As feminist media critic Jennifer Pozner argues, product place-ment, or brand integration, ‘is largely responsible for the reality-TV genre as we know it today, and not vice versa’. Th e networks followed the course set by programmes like Survivor (Mark Burnett Produc-tions, 2000– ), in which castaway contestants compete for products like Mountain Dew in immunity challenges, when they realized that instead of ‘the network paying actors, advertisers would pay the net-work for a starring role’.3 Th ough spot advertising persists for real-ity television in the USA, these programmes recall the days of single sponsorship prior to the quiz show scandals in the late 1950s; spon-sors, their products and their iconic logos have literally becomes a part of reality TV programmes. On the ratings behemoth American Idol (Fremantle Media North America, 2002– ) for example, judges drink from Coca-Cola glasses and sets feature Coke iconography. Si-multaneously, fi nalists produce weekly music videos promoting Ford automobiles that appear during the episode. In exchange for this product visibility, Coke, Ford, and third major sponsor AT&T have paid the Fox network over $20 million each per year.4

In the wake of this reality wave and its new economic models, LOST must have seemed like a disadvantaged relic – it had all the castaways and tropical trimmings of something like Survivor, but with a diegetic boundary to keep sponsors products out of the sto-ry and confi ned to traditional ad spots. When Matt Roush praises

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LOST in his review for Broadcasting and Cable, he singles out the pro-gramme for its lack of a franchise brand, lack of a formula, lack of big stars in a huge ensemble cast, and its very existence outside of the reality genre – all qualities that made LOST a less attractive product in the changing industrial climate.5 Th e critical enthusiasm mustered by Roush followed in large part from LOST’s rejection of the strat-egies currently being experimented with to appeal to advertisers. However, in a new world where the resources needed to support tra-ditional, more expensive fi ctional television had become increasingly scarce, LOST seemed like a dinosaur, albeit a narratively compelling one. Consequently, advertisers looked at LOST in its initial, single-platform confi guration with disdain. As late as September 2004, just prior to the series’ premiere, the trade journal Adweek lumped LOST among several scripted series described by media buyers as ‘clunkers,’ including such short-lived examples as Father of the Pride (Dreamworks Television, 2004–05), Listen Up (Regency Television, 2004–05) and Center of the Universe (CBS Television, 2004–05).6

While the report does not explicitly state how LOST earned this dubious distinction, shifting industrial attitudes and discourses over the past few years might account for the lack of advertiser interest. As one Advertising Age editorial puts it,

Video is Killing TV … the ad industry is undergoing a semantic shift that’s ousting broadcast TV as its central organizing prin-ciple. In its place, a more fl exible notion of video is emerging … every ad agency is trying to structure itself to produce more digi-tal content and escape the box of the 30-second-spot.7

Analysts predict heavy revenue losses in television’s future as adver-tisers increasingly turn to media forms that enable them to connect with viewers outside the broadcasting context of the spot advertise-ment.8 To stem this tide, broadcasting would have to adapt its opera-tions to the new economic reality by sweetening the opportunities available to advertisers on television. Th e fl ood of reality shows that dominated network television development and scheduling prior to the scripted revival that arguably followed in LOST’s wake, therefore, can be seen as part of an industrial attempt to provide more fl exible

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options to media buyers during this time of change. To advertisers in 2004, however, LOST off ered not more fl exibility, but more of the same.

WORLD BUILDING AS INSTITUTION BUILDING

Given the networks’ increased doubts about the economic viabil-ity of scripted programming, LOST’s rejection of brand integration in favour of developing in-world fi ctional institutions like Dharma appears all the more bold – even counterintuitive – in the face of marketplace demands. Contextualizing LOST within larger creative and economic trends as well as in a longer history of world building, however, puts into historical perspective the series’ attempts to cre-ate fi ctional institutions and then install them within the everyday realms of the real world.

LOST is certainly not the fi rst television series to expend a great deal of energy extending elements of its narrative not just across me-dia platforms, but also into the spaces and experiences of everyday life. Christopher Anderson argues, for example, that the Disneyland television series (Walt Disney Productions, 1954–90) worked to en-hance Disney’s theme park operations by blurring the line between programme and place to create an inhabitable textual space cotermi-nous with consumers’ everyday lives:

Whereas traditional notions of textuality assume that a text is singular, unifi ed, and autonomous, with a structure that draws the viewer inward, Disney’s television texts were, from the out-set, fragmented, propelled by a centrifugal force that guided the viewer away from the immediate textual experience toward a more pervasive sense of textuality, one that encouraged the con-sumption of further Disney texts, further Disney products, fur-ther Disney experiences.9

Disney characters and stories were not confi ned to closed texts, but began to seep into the lived spaces of consumption and tourism. Rather than draw the consumer into the Disney world, the Disney world was propelled outward into the real world of the consumer.

The Fictional Institutions of LOST

More recently, Jeff rey Sconce has identifi ed in the television indus-try of the 1980s and 1990s an increased attention to what he calls ‘world building’, the construction of complex narrative universes that use the relative diegetic depth of episodic television to cultivate new forms of audience engagement in an increasingly fragmented and competitive media marketplace.10

Examining similar trends in the 1990s, Kurt Lancaster examines how the series Babylon 5 (Babylonian Productions, 1994–98) mani-fested itself as a concrete universe, or ‘imaginary entertainment en-vironment’, where television textuality spilled not only into ancillary markets, but also into the spaces of everyday life. Th e diegetic depth of the series lent itself to deployment across media platforms via li-censed card games, for example, which in turn gave a physical tangi-bility to the diegesis as a real place in which viewers could perform roles and take actions through play.11 Similar arguments have been made by Janet Murray, who predicts that the increasing marriage of television and new media forms will lead not only to more complex narrative worlds, but simultaneously to a greater opportunity to oc-cupy ‘a contiguous virtual space and experience events, in persona, that are also happening to the characters in the series’.12 LOST’s at-tempts to spill its narrative institutions into the spaces of the ev-eryday might indeed substantiate Murray’s predictions, but these textual structures are part of a much larger historical trajectory of dispersing the television world into other texts and experiential con-texts.

To understand the serial storytelling of Lost – and push further our understanding of its ‘narrative complexity’ – we need to examine the aggregate interrelationships and narrative structures not just be-tween television episodes, but also across media platforms and spac-es of consumption.13 Th e experiences of narratives and the fi ctional institutions contained within them will change as serial television content moves out of the box sitting in the living room and across a range of media platforms and spaces. Th ese exchanges and exten-sions between television and digital platforms have been discussed variably by media scholars as ‘overfl ow’,14 ‘hyperseriality’,15 and per-haps most prominently by Henry Jenkins and others as ‘convergence

Reading LOST

… the fl ow of content across multiple media platforms, the coopera-tion between multiple media industries, and the migratory behav-iour of audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want’.16

While these perspectives off er useful lenses for conceptualizing contemporary television’s presence across a variety of media plat-forms, the articulation of such ‘transmedia storytelling’17 to the new aesthetics of digital culture potentially limits our comprehension of shows like LOST in at least two signifi cant ways. First, we might miss not only the non-digital historical precedents for world building across media, but also the way in which old, analog media maintain a persistent importance in contemporary convergence narratives: as we will see, print media like newspapers and paperback novels play an important role in the transmedia network of a property like LOST. Second, the metaphor of convergence threatens to obscure the way in which the serialized, cross-platform structure of LOST’s narra-tive simultaneously constitutes a coordinated narrative divergence. Instead of converging into a single, digital medium, the piecemeal narrative of LOST must be parsed together from clues dispersed across a series of media. In the same tradition of the Disney textual-ity of the 1950s, the divergence of the fragmented text across media platforms enables it to pervade everyday space and experience. In its participation in convergence culture, LOST is not a singular tele-visual narrative, but a manifold, multiplatform, divergent narrative often experienced outside of television or any single medium. Given that dispersed textuality is an historical phenomenon, are LOST’s current experiments with the fi ctional Dharma’s pervading everyday space in a manner similar to real institutions nothing new?

Th e fi ctional television world of LOST, like the real world, is structured by institutions. Th e actions that characters take occur in a world in which regular institutional bodies appear and reappear as fi xtures of everyday life; from Oceanic Airlines to the Apollo candy bar, there are companies and products with recognizable images and logos that pervade the fi ctional world of LOST. While only introduced at the beginning of the second season, the fi ctional Dharma Initia-tive, funded by the philanthropic Hanso Foundation, has become

The Fictional Institutions of LOST

a pillar of LOST mythology and a central site of ongoing narrative enigma. In the third season, increasingly important alongside these institutions became corporate entities like the Widmore Corpora-tion, the company run by the father of Desmond’s long-lost love, and Mittelos Bioscience, the company that purportedly recruited Juliet to conduct fertility experiments on the island on behalf of the Oth-ers. Th ese organizations have their hand in everything that has oc-curred in the series, either directly or indirectly, and as such provide a consistent backbone to support the entire LOST universe.

Th e mystery of the island is in large part an institutional mys-tery – what is it that attracted these institutions to the island, what did these entities do with all those hatches once they got there, and what role, if any, might these institutions have played in bringing the castaways to the island? Th e ubiquitous nature of these institutions in the LOST universe is such that they pervade the narrative even in episodes that are not purportedly ‘about’ them, often buried in the visuals of the mise-en-scène. If we look closely enough, we see that it is Widmore Labs, for example, that not only built or sponsored Henry Gale’s hot air balloon, but also manufactured the pregnancy tests taken in several diff erent episodes by Sun (Yunjin Kim), Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Juliet’s sister Rachel (Robin Weigert). LOST has become famous for the interconnections between its characters (we learn, for instance, that the fathers of both Jack (Matthew Fox) and Kate have played crucial roles in the lives of other castaways) yet less noticed is that these character relations all occur within a similar network of institutions. Th e series acquires depth and coherency as a narrative universe – what Matt Hills calls ‘hyperdiegesis’ – in large part because of the omnipresent nature of these reappearing and very visible institutions. Th ese structural entities glue LOST together as ‘a vast, detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text, but which nevertheless appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension.’18 Much of the LOST universe remains unseen, but the institutional nexus of Oceanic, Dharma, Hanso, Mittelos, Widmore, Apollo, et al. suggests its extensive expanse. Th e world-building project of LOST is very much an institution-building project.

Reading LOST

Th is alone does not distinguish LOST from other ‘cult’ television series that could also be described as hyperdiegetic. Institution build-ing has played a large role in the Star Trek franchise, for example, in which it is the specifi c, recognizable institutionalism of Starfl eet – its command structures, Prime Directive, uniforms, and insignia – that allows diff erent sets of characters operating in diff erent time frames and parts of the galaxy to be understood as part of the same narrative universe (rather than the same genre writ large). Th e my-thology of Buff y the Vampire Slayer (Mutant Enemy, 1997–2003) is similarly dependent on the institution of the Watcher’s Council that has trained female slayers since the beginning of recorded history. More recently, 24 (Imagine Entertainment, 2001– ) has pushed the creation of fi ctional institutions in more civic-minded, almost mun-dane, directions, generating a narrative playground for itself by con-structing new law enforcement agencies like the Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) that can interact with recognizable, real-world institu-tions like Homeland Security and the Offi ce of the President.

Unlike Star Trek, the hyperdiegetic space 24 constructs overlaps and intersects with the real-world institutions that structure the ev-eryday lives of audiences. Th is is a signifi cant development in world building, blurring the boundaries between hyperdiegetic and every-day space. LOST’s institutions may be fi ctional, but like those of 24, they prove more compatible with mundane, everyday institutions. Yet if 24 off ers a civic-minded hyperdiegesis, LOST provides a more corporate-minded set of fi ctional institutions, joining series like Angel (Mutant Enemy, 1999–2004), Arrested Development (Imagine Entertainment, 2003–06), and Th e Offi ce (BBC, 2001–03) that have created fi ctional companies like Wolfram and Hart, the Bluth Com-pany and Wernham-Hogg, respectively, to support narrative worlds fundamentally structured by corporate culture. LOST’s signifi cance lies in its development of a set of fi ctional institutions that can in-teract with the non-fantastic, mundane, corporate institutions of everyday life, a capacity that gives the fi ctional institution-building project of LOST greater economic viability in the current television market. While the fi ctional institutions of Star Trek have certainly contributed to the generation of countless billions of dollars for that

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franchise, the institutions of LOST establish that fi ctional universe as one coterminous with our own, in which real corporations too can become key institutional players.

BRINGING SPONSORS INTO PRODUCTION

AND INTO THE WORLD

LOST continues a historical trajectory of pervasive, divergent, hy-perdiegetic textuality that allows narrative spaces to spill into the spaces of the everyday, but it does so in a way specifi cally adapted to a shifting television economy in which the economic viability of lavish narrative programming has come into question and oppor-tunities for sponsor participation in the story world have become increasingly advantageous. While producers and executives certainly did not transform LOST from a single-platform television series into a multiplatform, divergent narrative solely for economic reasons, this development, regardless of its creative motivation, helped to make this ‘clunker’ into a cherry more attractive to media buyers.

Prior to the 2004 premiere, ABC increased LOST’s public visibility by experimenting with new promotional strategies: as one trade ar-ticle put it, the decline of broadcast viewership meant that networks could ‘no longer depend solely on promoting their new shows with their own on-air promotions, as they need to reach people who aren’t watching TV’.19 Lagging behind in the ratings, a desperate ABC hired a number of specialized marketing fi rms to help it fi nd creative ways to connect content with viewers. One of the resultant campaigns de-signed for LOST targeted vacationers by leaving messages in bottles on sandy beaches. Th is campaign fi rst moved LOST into the realm of the everyday, taking its promotions off air and into the spaces in which vacationers – indeed a valuable market to tap – relaxed away from the television set. By moving the series’ castaway theme to physical spaces, these bottles created exposure and additional media coverage in the press. Simultaneously, LOST promoters experiment-ed with websites positioned as non-fi ctional, including an offi cial site for Oceanic Air and a fan page for the diegetic band Drive Shaft. Due

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to the overall eff ectiveness of this summer campaign and LOST’s un-expected ratings success in the fall, executives expected to see similar non-traditional marketing campaigns follow, hoping to get audiences to ‘stumble’ upon programmes when away from the television.20

Th anks to that surprising performance, media buyers immedi-ately began to re-evaluate the cool reception they had given LOST. Th at success enabled ABC to use LOST as a pathfi nder for develop-ing new kinds of revenue models around fi ctional programming. In 2005, LOST was among the fi rst fee-based television content avail-able on iTunes, and by 2006, ABC was using the series as a draw for its experimental distribution of free, ad-supported content online.21 Based in part on the strength of LOST, ABC was able to attract ten sponsors to the trial, in which viewers would be given the choice of viewing a traditional spot, or playing an advertiser-sponsored game in exchange for viewing an episode.

Despite this success, LOST itself remained the sugar that made the bad medicine of advertisements tolerable. While advertiser-sponsored games may indeed have been fun, the pleasures of LOST itself remained cordoned off from sponsors’ products by the diegetic boundary between its narrative world and the advertising and pro-motional apparatus – unlike the attractive integration off ered by reality TV. Survivor’s castaways competed for Mountain Dew, while LOST’s castaways remained removed from the extra-diegetic world of sponsoring products like Sprite. In spot advertisements, sponsor-ing products remained external to the content desired by audiences. Th ough the network could force advertisement viewing in these ex-perimental online venues, the popularity of LOST with DVR users sustained the economic disadvantage of spot advertisements.

DVR viewing exacerbated the need to develop alternatives to tra-ditional broadcasting revenue models: though LOST’s status as the fourth-most DVR-ed programme in 2005 signalled its popularity with technologically elite audiences, it also suggested that advertis-ing time purchased during LOST was among the most at risk of being skipped by viewers. As Jim Edwards points out in Brandweek, though product placement appears most ubiquitously in reality TV (designed to thwart commercial skippers) and is used most ubiquitously in re-

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ality series, no reality series ranks among the top ten most DVR-ed programmes, so advertisers would benefi t more from placing prod-ucts in scripted series. However, as Edwards argues, scripted televi-sion is too much of a battleground: ‘writers, producers, networks, directors, and talent all have to be taken into account before a brand can appear’.22 In the words of one executive: ‘It’s not like in reality where any brand or any product will do.’23 To stand on equal footing with reality TV’s attractiveness to media buyers then, LOST needed to fi nd the right brand.

Unfortunately, the literal isolation of LOST’s setting and charac-ters from corporate brands and consumer lifestyles made this a tall order. Because the LOST narrative lacked any kind of institutional connection to the real world, there was no point of entry for any potential sponsor. So while the introduction of Dharma and Han-so may have emerged in response to storytelling needs, it had the pleasing side eff ect of allowing the series to support a brand of its own – a fi ctional institution that could serve as an intermediary, an interface, between the story world of the show and the corporate world of sponsors and consumers. As early as November 2004, the producers were promising a revamped, ‘considerably diff erent’ sea-son two.24 When those changes arrived the next October, the series’ focus shifted away from life on the beach to the castaways’ discovery and operation of a series of underground installations left behind by the mysterious Hanso Foundation and Dharma Initiative. Ulti-mately, along with ‘a whole new set of questions to ponder’,25 these institutions gave LOST a connectivity to the realm of global institu-tions that, however fi ctional, enabled the series to bring down the diegetic boundaries between narrative and marketing.

Th e capability to bring down those boundaries, however, did not automatically generate sponsor interest. With little creative control over the long-term development of Dharma and Hanso on televi-sion, direct interface with those fi ctional institutions remained a dicey proposition for potential sponsors. Yet if the institutional um-brella of Hanso and Dharma widened to encompass experiences in media spaces outside of television that sponsors could more handily control, creative and economic relationships between the fi ctional

Reading LOST

institutions of LOST and the corporate institutions of sponsors would become more tenable. If their institutional imprint exceeded the bounds of television, Hanso and Dharma could interact and have business relations with other real-world institutions in the spaces outside of television less centrally controlled by television writers. So following the start of the second season in fall 2005, Coca-Cola and three other sponsoring partners joined ABC to develop a viral mar-keting campaign that would transform LOST from a single-platform television narrative into a divergent set of media experiences. Th e idea was to make brands like Coca-Cola’s Sprite into key players in a mystery strewn across media platforms, integrating those brands into the expanded LOST narrative.26 Th is is not to suggest that LOST found a means of generating more revenue streams than through product placement. Instead, through the expansion of the hyper-diegetic into the realm of the everyday, LOST discovered a means of maintaining sponsor interest in expensive, expansive narrative television by setting a place for corporate marketers both within the sphere of production and within the story itself.

Th e resultant, coordinated transformation of LOST from a tele-vision text to a divergent, multiplatform launched as the alternate reality game (ARG) ‘Th e LOST Experience’ in the summer of 2006. Th e primary narrative function of the game was to explore enigmas that had accrued over the course of two seasons – what did the mys-terious 4-8-15-16-23-42 number sequence mean, and, most impor-tantly, how was it connected to the institutional presence of Dharma and Hanso on the island? But rather than answering these questions in a direct, narratively linear manner, the ARG buried the extended LOST narrative amid a range of consumption experiences through the careful coordination of content deployed successively through television and newspaper advertisements, public appearances, cor-porate websites, published novels, podcasts, guerilla video, and even candy distribution. To piece the narrative together over the course of the summer, viewers would have to pool their collective intelligence and talents.27 Th is coordinated multi-platform deployment of con-tent positioned the viewer not as an external spectator looking in on the story, but as a resident situated within the diegetic universe in

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which that story unfolded. Th e game hailed the viewer-player as an investigator of the mysterious Hanso Foundation and Dharma Ini-tiative, inviting them to look for clues amid advertisements and pro-motions that they experienced as a quotidian part of everyday life, not as part of a televisual narrative diegetically bound off from it.

Experiencing LOST outside of television, therefore, simultane-ously meant moving inside its narrative world. Th e fi ctional insti-tutions Hanso and Dharma, not fi ctional characters or narrative threads, enabled viewers to experience everyday life as part of the LOST hyperdiegesis – not just in the digital realm, but across a range of mediated experience. Advertisements supposedly paid for by the Hanso Foundation aired during ABC programmes, pointing view-ers to the Hanso website where they could search for clues on a site that hailed them not as LOST viewers, but as web surfers sharing the Foundation’s philanthropic interests. Print advertisements begged newspaper readers to discount claims made about Hanso by the tie-in novel Bad Twin. As the game continued, digital podcasts and guerilla videos emerged, purporting to reveal to the public the truth about the real Hanso Foundation – but they did so in concert with analog content deployed throughout everyday mediated spaces.

Staged public appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live (Jackhole In-dustries, 2003– ) and at the San Diego Comic Con even went so far as to purport that while LOST was fi ctional, the Hanso Foundation had a real history worthy of both cover-up and investigation. At Comic Con, ‘Rachel Blake’ (the anti-Hanso guerilla blogger), interrupted the producers’ discussion of the show and attacked the writers for their complicity with a real-life Dharma–Hanso agenda. Th e produc-ers played along with the fantasy, not denying the real-life existence of such fi ctional institutions, but quashing her conspiracy theory by claiming that they took dramatic license in their portrayal of them – a response met tersely by Blake: ‘you’re liars. You’re promoting them as some kind of force for good. But they’re not.’ If Comic Con brought these institutions into the spaces of reality by attacking them, Jimmy Kimmel did so by defending them, giving airtime to ‘Hugh McIntyre,’ the communications director for Hanso. Framed as a public relations intervention, McIntyre claimed that ‘the writers and producers of

Reading LOST

LOST have decided to attach themselves to our foundation’. Promot-ing Hanso’s major projects around the globe, McIntryre admitted that Dharma ‘was a real project’, but that ‘it’s just not true, the way [LOST’s producers are] colouring the project’. Both the Comic Con and Jimmy Kimmel Live incidents contrasted LOST’s fi ctional status with the purported real-life existence of Dharma–Hanso, construct-ing them as bigger and more real than the television programme from which they originated.

Without a doubt, the fact that these new web portals, printed products and promotional appearances could network across distri-bution outlets owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC, present-ed an opportunity for classically synergistic revenue multiplication. Th e appeal of a single property like LOST could be used to generate sales of other Disney-owned books, ratings for other Disney-owned television programmes, and hits for other Disney-owned web spaces. But it was the institutionalization of LOST across the spaces of ev-eryday life that presented further economic possibilities.

As Marie-Laure Ryan claims, the careful construction required of narrative becomes all too fragile and chaotic when too many inter-actors have the ability to impact an interactive story.28 It would be nearly impossible for an ARG like ‘Th e LOST Experience’ to construct any kind of meaningful interactive narrative in which all participants could be friends with Jack, Sawyer and Kate without sacrifi cing the agency of those participants in the story world. But by shifting the focus away from characters and towards institutions, the ARG side-stepped these obstacles, generating larger infrastructures that could be eff ectively shared by a wider range of participants. Players need not encounter familiar LOST characters to know they inhabit the LOST world, because they interact with it through their shared in-stitutional experiences. Just as Jack, Kate and Sawyer live in a world structured by Dharma and Hanso, so too do the players of the LOST ARG. Television characters and ARG players have separate experi-ences and encounters, but they all occur within the same institu-tional superstructure. However, perhaps most importantly for the argument forwarded here, the manner in which the institutions of LOST decentralize the narrative world (no longer dependent on the

The Fictional Institutions of LOST

central stories represented by Jack, Kate and Sawyer on the island) simultaneously decentralizes the creative power of constructing that world. Not only do these fi ctional institutions allow viewers to op-erative narratively within the LOST universe, but they also provide an interface with which other cultural institutions might enter the story as both content and producers of that content.

Over the course of the second season, the development of ‘Th e LOST Experience’ moved beyond synergistic Disney tie-ins, reaching out to other corporate interests that could partner with ABC to take advantage of the blurred line between LOST’s institutions and the in-stitutionalized spaces of everyday life. In interacting with the Hanso Foundation and Dharma Initiative as if they were real, viewer-players easily entered into a narrative space that would accept the sponsors affi liated with those institutions as legitimate players and sources of narrative detail. Instead of asking viewers to play as compensation for being granted access to the LOST universe, Sprite-based games could now be played from within the LOST universe by consumers play-acting as corporate-investigating, culture-jamming hackers. Similarly, Sprite’s ‘Sub-lymonal’ television commercials ceased to be advertisement, and became potential sources of narrative revelation to be mined for clues to LOST’s enigmas. Monster.com, a website that allows users to browse job listings and post their own resumes, also participated in this institutionalization of the Hanso Foundation, listing Hanso job openings throughout ‘Th e LOST Experience’. In do-ing so, the corporate operations of Monster.com became narratively operative as a source of information about Hanso’s hiring practices.

Even more adeptly, the web of clues and narrative threads of-fered that summer by ‘Th e LOST Experience’ directed viewer-play-ers to an offi cial Jeep website, where nosy visitors could exploit a convenient security lapse and pry through corporate documents that detailed the relationship between Hanso, Dharma and Daimler Chrysler. Daimler Chrysler literally became a player in the narrative as the unwitting supplier of the Jeep Compass vehicles used by Han-so to illegally transport human organs in South Africa. Examining the evidence exposes us to the new Compass schematics, but also gives the corporation a chance to distance itself from the nefarious

Reading LOST

schemes of Hanso. Th e fake memos hidden on the site could take the time to make it clear that while Chrysler did supply Hanso with top-quality merchandise, the automaker would never knowingly aid and abet human organ traffi cking. As a partner in ABC’s institutional de-ployment of LOST across media platforms, Jeep marketers enjoyed a decentralized creative control unavailable on traditional narrative television written under the aegis of a writing staff . Able to frame its own operations in interaction with Hanso, Jeep could shape its as-sociation with this fi ctional corporation as much or even to a greater degree than it could with product placement. When narrative encom-passes the corporate realm of everyday life, the economic exchanges between viewer and advertiser can take place in the context of the narrative. As a report in Advertising Age explains, ‘Th e LOST Experi-ence’ provided the ‘must-see, bite-sized content … [that] … advertis-ers have been seeking as the world of multi-platform programming explodes’.29 By tying its fi ctional institutions to those of reality, LOST was able to refi t narrative television for integrated marketing in the age of reality TV, moving brand integration outside of the fi ctional and into a space sponsors could control.

In institutionalizing the Hanso Foundation and Dharma Initia-tive, however, LOST not only created a space for the integration of sponsors’ brands, but it also created a brand for itself that it could begin to leverage on its own. As with many series, ABC markets products stamped with the LOST logo that acknowledge the fi ctional status of the series itself; but alongside these more traditional mer-chandising eff orts have arisen a supplementary line of products that, like the Jimmy Kimmel and Comic Con appearances, position fi ction-al institutions as bigger and more real than the fi ction from which they came. Yet while those appearances might be best described as promotion, these product lines generate revenue in their own right. While currently limited in scope, a line of Dharma-branded merchan-dise has emerged that perpetuates the illusion of the institution’s reality and maintains its presence in the spaces of everyday life. On ABC.com, one can buy not just Dharma-branded T-shirts and hats that increase the institution’s presence in quotidian life when the user wears them, but also Dharma-brand composition books (just

The Fictional Institutions of LOST

like those used in the Pearl station!). Th e fact that these composition books come in a set of three suggests that while severely overpriced – $14.95 for the set, plus shipping – they are packaged for eventual consumption, designed to be used and replaced. While a relatively obscure tie-in product, these notebooks constitute a signifi cant step in tie-in marketing: these are not just LOST collectibles, but a line of consumable goods sold on the brand name of Dharma.

While it may seem far-fetched to imagine the actual distribution and marketing of Dharma beer, macaroni and automobiles, the poten-tial for further mobilization and capitalization on the Dharma brand seems conceivable – especially as other series such as Th e Offi ce (Rev-eille Productions, 2005– ) continue this trajectory by selling Dunder Miffl in T-shirts and paper products. Indeed, in 2007 industry ana-lysts increasingly began to consider the merits of this kind of ‘reverse product placement’, in which marketers ‘create a fi ctional brand in a fi ctional environment and then release it into the real world’.30 Ana-lysts are still unsure of the mass-market potential for reverse product placement, but consider the possibility that it could be most cost ef-fective to launch a product through fi ction than typical advertising and marketing channels. Th e Dharma brand may only be used to sell T-shirts and notebooks at the moment, but the possibility remains that it, and other fi ctional brands like it, might yet become greater sources of institutionalized revenue in their own right.

CONCLUSION Ultimately, LOST represents the dissolution of boundaries between diegetic space and the space of consumption, allowing narrative, pro-motion and advertising to overlap. Mike Benson, ABC’s senior mar-keting vice president, suggests that the industry look at marketing

more like content … If we can take the program, explore the stories and perpetuate the mystery … and people can share this stuff , it furthers the relationship with the audience. We’re craft-ing content, and we work with the sales departments and inte-grate them with the original marketing materials.31

Reading LOST

While LOST heralded a narrative resurgence on US network televi-sion to counter the trend toward reality, it simultaneously succeeded in integrating the spaces of narrative, marketing and everyday re-ality. On television, fi ctional institutions like Dharma, Hanso, Wid-more and so many others serve as the diegetic glue binding together networks of interrelated characters and actions. But when LOST di-verges as a narrative, moving away from television and into other media and spaces of everyday life, those institutions begin to struc-ture more than just the lives of television characters.

When fi ctional institutions like Dharma or Hanso become part of quotidian existence, quotidian activities can be subsumed un-derneath their institutional umbrellas: the actions of audiences and their movements between diff erent platforms of media experience can now take place within the hyperdiegetic world. Th is is not, how-ever, just a curious evolution in televisual form, but it is also a signifi -cant economic development, as the blurred boundaries between nar-rative consumption and the institutionally positioned experiences of everyday life make sponsors a part of the story world. Real-life corporations that enter into economic relations with fi ctional insti-tutions can become a creative part of the everyday LOST experience. Th e Dharma–Hanso complex may not be as real as Jeep, Monster.com or Sprite, but its institutional relationships with them and to con-sumer life have increasingly become quite real.

Notes

1 Chad Raphael, ‘Th e political economic origins of Reali-TV’, in Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (eds), Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2004), p.122.

2 Ted Magder, ‘Th e end of TV 101: Reality programmes, formats, and the new business of television’, in Murray and Ouellette (eds): Real-ity TV, p.152.

3 Jennifer L. Pozner, ‘Triumph of the shill: Reality TV lets market-ers write the script’, Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture (Spring 2004), pp.51–9.

The Fictional Institutions of LOST

4 Steve McClellan, ‘Idol moments ahead for advertisers: Fox’s third rendition is an orgy of integrated marketing’, Broadcasting and Cable cxxxiv/1 (5 January 2004), p.20.

5 Matt Roush, ‘Lost and found! An original idea’, Broadcasting and Ca-ble cxxxiv/41 (11 October 2004), p.44.

6 John Consoli, ‘Nets to reduce repeats’, Mediaweek xiv/21 (24 May 2004), pp.7–8.

7 Matthew Creamer, ‘Don’t call it TV: Rebuilding for the video age’, Advertising Age lxxvii/14 (3 April 2006), p.1.

8 Diane Mermigas, ‘Television biz needs interactive foresight’, Holly-wood Reporter 390 (13 September 2005), pp.8, 53.

9 Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: Th e Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), p.155.

10 Jeff rey Sconce, ‘What if? Charting television’s new textual bounda-ries’, in Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (eds), Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp.94–5.

11 Kurt Lancaster, Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performances in a Me-dia Universe (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), p.30.

12 Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: Th e Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: Th e Free Press, 1997), p.264. By suggesting viewers can experience events in persona, she suggests that viewers can themselves be represented by some kind of avatar in the narra-tive world.

13 Jason Mittell, ‘Narrative complexity in contemporary American tel-evision’, Th e Velvet Light Trap lviii/1 (2006), pp.29–40.

14 Will Brooker, ‘Living on Dawson’s Creek: Teen viewers, cultural con-vergence, and television overfl ow’, International Journal of Cultural Studies iv/4 (2001), pp.448–55.

15 Murray: Hamlet on the Holodeck, p.254.

16 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Col-lide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p.2. See also John Caldwell, ‘Convergence TV: Aggregating form and repurposing con-tent in the culture of conglomeration’, in Spigel and Olsson (eds): Television After TV, pp.41–74.

17 Jenkins: Convergence Culture, pp.20–1.

18 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002), p.137.

Reading LOST

19 Claire Atkinson, ‘Networks add alternatives to traditional on-air promos’, Advertising Age lxxv/25 (21 June 2004), p.6.

20 See John Consoli, ‘Nets boost nontraditional eff orts despite higher cost,’ Adweek xlvi/35 (12 September 2005), p.7; Jim Finkle, ‘New shows, new marketing’, Broadcasting and Cable cxxxv/8 (21 Febru-ary 2005), p.8.

21 A.J. Frutkin, ‘Big Networks Diff er on Best Use of “Th ird Screen”,’ Adweek 47:19 (8 May 2006), p. 8; Anne Becker, ‘ABC’s Digital Evan-gelists,’ Broadcasting & Cable 136:13 (27 March 2006), p. 13.

22 Jim Edwards, ‘Time-shifted viewing fi gures off er dramatic reality check’, Brandweek xlvii/45 (11 December 2006), p.9.

23 Ibid.

24 Marc Berman, ‘Dy-no-mite!’, Mediaweek xiv/41 (15 November 2004), p.34.

25 Jennifer Armstrong, ‘Love, labor, Lost’, Entertainment Weekly 838/839 (9 September 2005), pp.28–33.

26 Kate MacArthur, ‘Bea Perez,’ Advertising Age lxxvii/38 (18 Septem-ber 2006), p.S4.

27 For more on the concept of ‘collective intelligence’ see Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (Cam-bridge: Perseus Books, 1997). For direct application of Levy’s work to media consumption, see Henry Jenkins, ‘Interactive Audiences?’, in Virginia Nightingale and Karen Ross (eds), Critical Readings: Media and Audiences (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003), pp.279–95. See also Chapter III in this volume.

28 Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Inter-activity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Th e Johns Hop-kins University Press, 2001), p.304.

29 Claire Atkinson, ‘Getting creative with web games’, Advertising Age lxxvii/37 (11 September 2006), p.S4.

30 Todd Wasserman, ‘Forward thinkers push reverse product place-ment’, Brandweek.com (29 January 2007), available at www.brand-week.com/bw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003538681.

31 Atkinson: ‘Getting creative with web games’, p.S4.